Sorry, Antis: Gun ownership is SURGING

The anti-gun, citizen-control cult has been whistling past the graveyard for the past year, attempting to assert that the unprecedented surge in firearms and ammunition sales over the course of the past few years (feel free to read that as “the Obama Presidency”) is the result of a small number of existing gun owners buying a tremendous amount of guns and ammo… a claim that never passes the sniff test to be remotely plausible.

Gun ownership is not only up across the board, but the people buying guns are changing, with the biggest growth areas being young, urban, and female shooters. That rather neatly slices apart the old anti-gun adage that gun ownership was only for old white men living in the country.

The slow drop-off of households owning guns has ended, rebounding in a new poll to 39 percent, up five points from the latest survey.

A new Economist/YouGov poll said that nearly 4 in 10 American households have guns, with 56 percent claiming not to have one.

That is a sizable uptick from the four-decade drop in household ownership charted by the authoritative General Social Survey. It pegged household gun ownership at 50 percent in the 1970s, 49 percent in the 1980s, 43 percent in the 1990s, and down to 35 percent in the 2000s. The latest 2012 statistics put the share of households with guns at 34 percent.

The next General Social Survey is set for release this year. It is funded by the government through the National Science Foundation. Considered more reliable than phone surveys, gun advocates say that surveys like those conducted by Economist/YouGov are more timely and are capturing the shift in the nation’s view of personal weapons.

Keep in mind that respondents typically underreport gun ownership in these sorts of surveys (especially if they live in areas where guns are looked down upon, such as blue states), and tend to tell pollsters what they think they should hear instead of what actually is, and the actual number of households with firearms is likely to be as high as 50% or greater, and I wouldn’t be stunned if it were as high as 6-in-10.